B.H. Fairchild

The Problem

The Problem

The name of the bow is life, but its work is death.—The Fragments

How in Heraclitusideas of things, quality, and eventcoalesce—sun/warmth/dawn—the perceiver/perceived, too,not yet parsed, not yet,and then the great Forgetting,breath and breather, love and beloved,world and God-in-the-world.But then it comes upon us: that brightness,that bright tension in animals, for instance,that focus, that compassof the mammalian mind findingits own true North,saintly in its dark-eyed,arrow-eared devotion.

Angels

Elliot Ray Neiderland, home from college one winter, hauling a load of Herefords from Hogtown to Guymon with a pint of Ezra Brooks and a copy of Rilke’s Duineser Elegien on the seat beside him, saw the ass-end of his semi gliding around in the side mirror as he hit ice and knew he would never live to see graduation or the castle at Duino.

In the hospital, head wrapped like a gift(the nurses had stuck a bow on top), he saidfour flaming angels crouched on the hood, wings spread so wide he couldn’t see, and thenthe world collapsed. We smiled and passed a flask around. Little Bill and I sang Your Cheatin’ Heart and laughed, and then a sudden quiet put a hard edge on the morning and we left.

Flight

Outside my window the wasps are making their slow circle, dizzy flights of forage and return, hovering among azaleasthat bob in a sluggish breeze this humid, sun-torn morning.

Yesterday my wife held me hereas I thrashed and moaned, her hand in my foaming mouth, and my son saw what he was warned he might.

Last night dreams stormed my brain in thick swirls of shame and fear.Behind a white garage a locked shed full of wide-eyed dolls burned,yellow smoke boiling up in huge clumps as I watched, feet nailed to the ground. In dining cars white table clothsunfolded wings and flew like gulls.

Early Occult Memory Systems Of The Lower Midwest

In his fifth year the son, deep in the backseat of his father's Ford and the mysteriumof time, holds time in memory with words,night, this night, on the way to a stalled rig south of Kiowa Creek where the plains wind stacks the skeletons of weeds on barbed-wire fences and rattles the battered DeKalb sign to make the child think of time in its passing, of death.

Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this road. Roustabouts shouting from the crow's nest float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights. Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky, cloud-swags running the moon under, and starlight rains across the Ford's blue hood. Blue, this blue.

Later, where black flies haunt the mud tank, the boy walks along the pipe rack dragging

Motion Sickness

I am tired of the heave and swell, the deep lunge in the belly, the gut's dumb show of dance and counterdance, sway and pause, the pure jig of nausea in the pit of a spinning world. Where the body moves, the mind often lags, clutching deck, anchor, the gray strap that hangs like the beard of death from the train's ceiling, the mind lost in the slow bulge of ocean under the moon's long pull or the endless coil of some medieval argument for the existence of God or the dream of the giant maze that turns constantly in and in on itself and there is no way out . . . I am sick and tired of every rise and fall of the sun, the moon's tedious cycle that sucks blood from the thighs of women and turns teenage boys into wolves

The Deposition

Dust storm, we thought, a brown swarmplugging the lungs, or a locust-cloud,but this was a collapse, a slow sinkingto deeper brown, and deeper still, like the skyseen from inside a well as we are lowered down,and the air twisting and tearing at itself.But it was done. And the body hung therelike a butchered thing, naked and alonein a sudden hush among the ravaged air.The ankles first—slender, blood-caked,pale in the sullen dark, legs brokenbelow the knees, blue bruises smolderingto black. And the spikes. We tugged ironfrom human flesh that dangled like limbsnot fully hacked from trees, nudgedthe cross beam from side to side untilthe sign that mocked him broke loose.It took all three of us. We shouldered the bodyto the ground, yanked nails from wristsmore delicate, it seemed, than a young girl’s

Thermoregulation in Winter Moths

How do the winter moths survive when other moths die? What enables them to avoid freezing as they rest, and what makes it possible for them to fly -- and so to seek food and mates -- in the cold?Bernd Heinrich, Scientific American

1. The Himalayas

The room lies there, immaculate, bone lighton white walls, shell-pink carpet, and pale, too,are the wrists and hands of professors gatheredin the outer hall where behind darknessand a mirror they can observe unseen.They were told: high in the HimalayasBuddhist monks thrive in sub-zero coldfar too harsh for human life. Suspendedin the deep grace of meditation, they raisetheir body heat and do not freeze to death.So five Tibetan monks have been flownto Cambridge and the basement of Reed Hall.They sit now with crossed legs and slight smiles,and white sheets lap over their shoulderslike enfolded wings. The sheets are wet,

The Art of the Lathe

Leonardo imagined the first one.The next was a pole lathe with a drive cord,illustrated in Plumier's L'art de tourner en perfection.Then Ramsden, Vauconson, the great Maudslay,his student Roberts, Fox, Clement, Whitworth.

The long line of machinists to my leftlean into their work, ungloved hands adjusting the calipers,tapping the bit lightly with their fingertips.Each man withdraws into his house of work:the rough cut, shearing of iron by tempered steel,blue-black threads lifting like locks of hair,then breaking over bevel and ridge.Oil and water splash over the whitening bit, hissing.The lathe on night-shift, moonlight silvering the bed-ways.

Body and Soul

Half-numb, guzzling bourbon and Coke from coffee mugs,our fathers fall in love with their own stories, nuzzlingthe facts but mauling the truth, and my friend's father beginsto lay out with the slow ease of a blues ballad a storyabout sandlot baseball in Commerce, Oklahoma decades ago.These were men's teams, grown men, some in their thirtiesand forties who worked together in zinc mines or on oil rigs,sweat and khaki and long beers after work, steel guitar musicwhanging in their ears, little white rent houses to return towhere their wives complained about money and broken Kenmoresand then said the hell with it and sang Body and Soulin the bathtub and later that evening with the kids asleeplay in bed stroking their husband's wrist tattoo and smokingChesterfields from a fresh pack until everything was O.K.Well, you get the idea. Life goes on, the next day is Sunday,another ball game, and the other team shows up one man short.

They say, we're one man short, but can we use this boy,he's only fifteen years old, and at least he'll make a game.They take a look at the kid, muscular and kind of knowing